Grafeneck

On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by the Red Army on January 27, 1945, a commemorative event was held in Freiburg at the Kaisersaal of the Historisches Kaufhaus. The event was entitled Shame, Silence, Grief, Trauma. Nazi euthanasia and the consequences for the families of those murdered.

Red Baron arrived early, but Freiburg officials and celebrities had already taken half of the limited number of seats.

After a musical introduction, Lord Mayor Martin Horn welcomed the attendees. With right-wing populists on the rise in many countries, he warned in his speech against a repeat of the political events in 1933. Within just two months, the Nazis had transformed the democracy of the Weimar Republic into an authoritarian regime.

Red Baron is not as pessimistic as his mayor because the political situation 2025 is very different from 1933. Large sections of the population rejected the Weimar Republic. They had become accustomed to an authoritarian state during the Second Reich and were thus alienated from popular rule. Further shaken by economic crises and unemployment, this democracy only lasted fifteen years.

This evening, Red Baron tried to cross Freiburg's Platz der Alten Synagoge
and was caught in a crowd demonstrating against the Right.

This photo (©dpa), taken from the opposite side, is more impressive,
with an estimated 15,000 people demonstrating.

Although Germany's economy is weakening and many people fear for their jobs, a democratic self-image has been established for 75 years, at least in the western states of the Federal Republic. Frequently, people take to the streets and demonstrate against the right-wing AfD and for democracy.

Then Thomas Stöckle, director of the Grafeneck Memorial, gave a lecture on the Nazi euthanasia program.

On the clearance of the destruction of life unworthy to live.
Its measure and its form.

Already in the early 1920s, doctors and lawyers propagated eugenics, racial hygiene, and the extermination of unworthy life.

You contribute here. Up to the age of 60,
a person with a hereditary disease costs, on average, 50,000 Reichsmarks.

Under the Nazis, posters were used to draw attention to the economic burden of preserving people with hereditary diseases.

On September 1. 1939, Hitler himself authorized the destruction of life unworthy of living, euphemistically called Gnadentod (mercy killing).

T4 Vernichtungszentren (extermination centers)

The measures were carried out under Aktion T4, which stands for the systematic mass murder of more than 70,000 people with physical, mental, and psychological disabilities in Germany from 1940 to 1941.

Weltkriegskrüppel (Cripples of the Great War) at Grafeneck in 1922

On October 14, 1939, the Grafeneck "cripple home" was the first to be confiscated by the government. "It is used for the purposes of the Reich and is to be cleared of inmates and nursing staff."

An information sheet defined the criteria according to which people were to be registered for the euthanasia program. They were deported from their previous sanitoriums and nursing homes to the extermination centers by decree of November 23, 1939.

On January 18, 1940, 25 patients from the Bavarian Eglfing-Haar sanatorium and nursing home in Munich were the first to be gassed with carbon monoxide at Grafeneck,

Nazi officials systematically lied about the cause of death to the relatives of those murdered in the extermination centers. In this context, it is shocking to read the complaint of a father on October 14, 1940, who had to learn of the death of his son, a combatant in the Great War:

According to your communication of August 23, 1940, my son Otto Bögel left your institution on August 22 to take his last walk. Despite this long time ago, I have not yet been reimbursed for my son's 39 days' overpayment of 159.51 Reichsmarks food allowance. If this does not happen in the next few days, I will be forced to complain elsewhere.

It is a tremendous impertinence to believe anything about this matter because people talk with shock and horror up and down the country about what is happening at Grafeneck.

In any case, the Fatherland's gratitude for former combatants could not be expressed more blatantly than through such a heroic death. And then it can hardly be surpassed if one still has the audacity to write that all medical efforts have unfortunately been unsuccessful.

In any case, a higher judge will pass judgment on this matter in his own time.

A deeply saddened father

Apparently, Aktion T4 was known to large sections of the population. When the Archbishop of Münster, Count Clemens August von Galen*, spoke of murder in his sermons and hinted at the killing of war invalids, Hitler gave a verbal order on August 24, 1941, to temporarily halt Aktion T4 to calm unrest in church circles. However, the killing of unworthy lives continued in secret.
*called the Lion of Münster for his harsh critics of the Nazi regime in his sermons

In a balance sheet as of December 1, 1941, statistician Edmund Brandt calculated the cost savings for the German Reich, "70,273 people were disinfected. This results in an annual cost saving for the German Reich of 88 million Reichsmarks."

Stolperstein (stumbling block) in Freiburg for Flora Baer (©Marlies Meckel)

Michelle Kaye then reported on her great-grandmother Flora Baer, who died at the age of 48. She was deported to Grafeneck together with around 70 other people on August 18, 1940, and murdered in the gas chamber on the same day.

Let such inhumanities never happen again.

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